Avada Software Infrared360 Reviews

For several tenants, we need to manage a total of nearly 200 queue managers, and each queue manager has approximately 100 queues, aliases, etc. We run the queue managers on Windows Server in four operating centers.

• We now have the possibility of getting a central perspective on all tenants.

• We have defined access roles for developers. Therefore, they can 'read in' their queues on the development and testing stages. With special roles, they may also write. This improves our development and testing cycle.

• For operative systems, we have restricted the access. Still, selected people can react if something is happening in the various BOQs.

• Role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems.

• Ease of use: Everything runs in a browser. Thus, it can be used by all interested parties.

• We definitely need a better overview in terms of a dashboard giving us insights. It should also provide insights to our management. 
• We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants.

One to three years.

No problems.

Till now, no Problems.

They react if something is problematic. We found a little bug, and it was corrected in the next release. They also have very responsive communications.

Our company did not use a previous solution.

With a Little support from Avada Software, very straightforward.

We implemented with in-house via telephone support by Avada.

Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand.

Getting contact to product manager and architects of Avada software can be done quickly and in direct sessions. For us, a big help and advantage.

The monitoring helps keep our organization's IBM MQ environment (including its applications) available for the business. In fact, we are able to send triggered alerts through our organization's central monitoring solution and generate the incident tickets easily with Infrared360.

Infrared360 also has an easy to use MQ navigation that let's our users quickly filter objects.

Documentation.

The biggest thing that Infrared360 has done for us is secure our IBM MQ environments. With our previous tool, users required universal access to MQ in order even look at objects.

None.

None.

Excellent. We always receive a response from technical support as soon as possible.

Yes. The lack of security and monitoring features caused us to switch.

Very straightforward. The actual installation process can be done within 15 minutes. Afterwards, the setup is fairly straightforward once you have designed the appropriate security and monitoring standards for your organization.

 I was not involved in the negotiations.

• Nastel
• BMC Mainview

I highly recommend Infrared360 for an all-in-one IBM MQ tool. It's scalable, secure, and more importantly, easy to use.

An offsite team performs a daily infrastructure health check using Infrared360 and sends reports to the technical/management teams. This fulfills an important security requirement within our organization.

Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution.

• Administration: It provides a centralized audit trail of all the infrastructure changes.
• Monitoring: It gives the ability to integrate with my company's global notification system, and the ability to proactively automate corrective actions.
• Delegation: It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams.

The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent and has a very quick turn-around.

We previously used an agent-based tool; Infrared360 is agentless. We switched to Avada Software because of the long agent installation, upgrade times and also, as the agents often crashed and consumed excessive system resources.

We, also, wrote our own tools in-house that were too difficult to support long-term.

The initial setup was straightforward. The secure login service and the third-party database setup was not well documented (that was in 2007); the documentation has improved since then. Also, software upgrades are very quick and simple.

Avada Software's licensing metric is very good because the license fees are based on the number of connections (which have not increased for us very much over the years) rather than the CPU processing power (which increases significantly whenever our hardware is upgraded) or the number of users (which has increased for us a lot since our original purchase).

We looked at home-grown solutions and several other more expensive third-party products including Nastel and BMC.

This is a Swiss Army-like product that has many functions and services, but many of those, do not need to be configured initially. Use wildcard object names, clone/reuse existing services and objects rather than trying to create everything from scratch.

With the use of the packaged MQ explorer eclipse thick client, there was a significant amount of time spent configuring each local installation and making sure environmental settings were individually validated to provision each client's access. The use of the IR360 administrative console has removed that variable, because of the use of a common interface managed via a browser. The IR360 central security configuration management is what drives the distributed access control via a group/role matrix we've set up according to our business. As we get more granular within our estate, we are able to support the scale out to create groups/roles to support new areas as required.

Some of the most valuable features we use include group and role management functions. These allow us to provision access to various development and support groups across the middleware estate. This provides a more transparent view into our messaging infrastructure flows. We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types. This has been successfully used by different groups.

We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place.

We have had the application running previously on WAS and have only recently migrated it to use the Tomcat StandAlone installation. We have found both to be quite stable.

Management of our entire Middleware MQ estate on IR360 for the past five years has not yielded any scalability issues.

I would give the level of Avada technical support we have received a solid 10/10.

We did use, and still use, an agent-based middleware monitoring solution which feeds into a single pane of glass monitor for first level support alerting. Although there is overlap between the technology products, our development and administrative middleware teams use IR360 for deep dive and evidence collection efforts around troubleshooting and testing support.

There is planning involved at the beginning stages, when you must plan the logical layout of the groups and roles. It is quite straightforward from this point onward. Documentation is clear and Avada support has provided clarification or suggestions upon our requests.

Our internal budget calculation model incorporates the pricing per endpoint for any new projects. However, as our footprint for distributed queue managers shrinks as part of our shared middleware hub deployment, the initial licensing and support costs have been reduced over the last five years.

I had evaluated other agent based solutions which met limited requirements and found that the administrative overhead to manage those solutions required a much larger team. IR360 does not require a large team to manage our entire middleware estate and allows the leveraging of a logical model of reuse.

Attempt your PoC with IR360 and incorporate your business to be the recipient of IR360 reporting. Reporting is 50% of any solution like this!

The monitoring that's available through their system alerts us early on to problems, so we're able to react quickly to the problems that come.

The product has a small footprint on our system. We don't use a lot of clients. They're very knowledgeable of MQ, which we use. It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good.

The product itself is very sound and Avada has done a great job of anticipating customer needs and keeping up with new MQ functionality. However, one area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful.

We did not have stability issues with the system that we had put in originally. It was fine. We just did an upgrade and they did a pretty big overhaul on the navigation. The documentation for the new install was a little lacking and then we had some problems getting it working. There's been some bugs, but we've worked around those and we're waiting for the next service pack.

We haven’t had any scalability issues. It’s been able to handle everything. Again, with the new version, we've had to update some of the configuration just because of the requirements with the new version. Other than that, we haven't had any usage problems or outages based on the product.

I would rate technical support 4.5/5. They're really quick to respond and it doesn't take them very long at all to come up with an answer or to identify a bug.
It was about three weeks ago when we had our last ticket open. I don’t know that they could do anything to improve. Their response rates are really good and they're knowledge base is really good. I generally don't give out perfect scores I guess.

They have identified most everything in the next service pack that we're waiting for. Other than that, it's been fine. The transition to the new version was kind of difficult, but we've worked through that and they've been really good about addressing the issues when I open tickets. They got right on them. At the time, there was quite a few things we noticed.

Originally, when we went with them, they came out on site and spent at least three days here going over it. That was with the original product. Since the upgrade, there really hasn't been any training, but we've been able to transition to the new format without needing really any training.

I know they've added some things to the product, but we're not taking advantage of those so it really hasn't applied. We really haven't looked for any new training. We've been able to transition into the new version.

Previously, we used a different product and it was very difficult to upgrade. Originally it was called AppWatch and I think the company was MQ Software. It was hard to find the upgrades. It was a much bigger corporation that supported it so the technical support was not very personal at all. It was really hard to find the right version to upgrade to and to determine which support packet to download and install.

It was a large install. It was a big footprint on the server and it had clients that we had to install on all the different servers. It was really cumbersome. The monitoring, the alerting and monitoring was not all that dependable. Not like this one.
Then we had switched to IBM's offering, it was originally OMEGAMON. Then they rebranded it. It was a different name by the time we used it. So we dropped that one. Those were the two previous products that we used. Then we went to this one.

The initial setup was well documented. It wasn't overly complex. They also made sure that they had technical support people on their side ready on-call. We had already scheduled and told them when we were going to do the install and they were completely available to us at any point during that time. That was really perfect for what we needed.

This last install was a little bit disappointing because the documentation wasn't as clear-cut. The configurations weren't as well documented. Originally, it was very easy to install, easy to get going and up and running. Then again, with this latest version, it was a little less documented and a little bit harder to do; but not all that time consuming either way.

There are two of us that did the administration and so knowing what we had and then after the demo of IR360, it was pretty clear that this was a much better product for what we needed.

It was either to go back to AppWatch, which gave us little or no support, or OMEGAMON, which was just a huge product to roll out. By then, we had already been in contact with Avada and they showed us their product. It was a pretty easy choice at that point. At that point, we didn't really look into any other software packages after Avada did their demo.

Check it out. Make sure that it's right for your environment and that it'll have the features that you want. I would highly recommend it if it's for an average MQ environment. It would fit perfectly. At the very least, I would recommend a demo to see the product.

The guys behind Avada are very knowledgeable with MQ, so they've put a lot of features in there that leverage MQ and the functionality and their support. They're very knowledgeable and they're very good at following up with their customers.
I hear from my account rep quite often with new upgrades or any questions or problems. They don't just contact you when it's annual renewal time. They frequently touch base to see how we're doing.

One way it's helped the business is how you're able to empower MQ users, without your administrators, to be able to do different types of processes in the environment. It has user group privileges that allow you to set up security roles in the system. You can allocate permissions and actions that other users can do to maintain different MQ tasks so that you don't have to. The administrator doesn't have to do all the work. They can delegate some of the work to people to do what that they're capable of doing, without risking access to parts of the system you don't need other people in.

The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities.

Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools.

I don't think it's a bad thing, but that might be an area where I would probably make it a little more Windows-like, Microsoft-like. When you work with Apple or Microsoft, they have a style that you're used to and any other app you bring up follows that same kind of template. I think IR360 just used their own template.

It's not a bad thing. It's just something you get used to once you're using the tool. I think in their latest version, they have actually done a lot of that to uniformly match the operating system.

The interface just needs to keep improving to where it looks more and more like other applications. Then, when new users come in, it's not as hard for them to learn and navigate around the environment. It's easy to navigate once you understand how they set their GUI up. It would be something similar to how Windows or Excel follow a certain platform design and you know exactly how they work. If they look at installing some standard templates like other applications use, it will be easier for a brand new user to jump in there and navigate around the tool.

It has always worked. It's a little, lightweight product and it works great. It always did what I set it up to do.

It's a pretty straightforward tool. I know customers that have it hooked up to thousands of MQ managers. It's very scalable. It's very easy to implement and use. It's not really something that's difficult.

I give them a 5/5. Their customer service is second to none. They are open to any kind of suggestion you want to do to improve the product. They're quick to actually implement it. They take a lot of enhancement requests and they put that into the systems. They're always open to improving the product.

If you ever have a problem, they're quick to respond. One of the best things about their product is if there are any types of things you don't understand how it works or you need to get something changed, they're great about that. They're quick to help you if you're running into some kind of issue. I love their customer service.

We used IBM Candle. We've used BMC, which was a hard-to-set-up, hard-to-manage, client-based software that’s too cumbersome to manage. It was extremely hard to set up and manage. The setup of a lot of the products I review is hard to maintain. They're just hard to administrate and not very flexible with what you want do with them. I found I360 to be very flexible to do everything you want to do. It was a monitoring and administration tool. A lot of the monitoring tools I've used before, are either administration or monitoring tools. This was both.

Initial setup was straightforward. It's just a simple Tomcat application. Once you have it installed, it's a basic setup as long as you have a pretty straightforward environment. They are really good about helping you get it set up and assist you from start to finish.

At one time, we used Candle. It's IBM now. Before we upgraded to our I360, we were using another product that was really bad. I suggested they bring in I360. We had an evaluation with it and everyone liked it. It's what we've gone with.

I would definitely use it beyond a monitoring tool. But, I would also use it to set up the systems and to get other people involved; not just a monitoring tool for administrative use. I would definitely branch out and extend the capabilities where you empower other people. They can do a lot of the simple tasks in MQ management and development all the way up to other operations teams being able to do their own monitoring. I would definitely expand it where it's not just one team managing it and using it. I would definitely leverage it to a lot different teams in your organization.

The ability for development teams to have access to their MQ queues has freed us up as administrators to do things other than chase down an application’s message for research purposes.

- Monitoring that ties into our incident management system
- Visibility of the MQ environment to non-MQ personnel

The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved.

Not really, other than minor memory leaks. But a monthly cycling of the server is usually all that is required (which we have to do for patching anyways).

We have not really pushed the product hard. Although we have 500 active users, it is difficult to know how hard the system is being hit.

Tech support is pretty good. All of our questions are answered promptly.

We did use a prior tool for part of what Infrared360 provides for us. We just needed the monitoring component along with Active Directory authentication.

Initial setup was complex in terms of defining the appropriate groups and access rights to the various development communities around the enterprise.

Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs. What I find most onerous is that we also want to use the tool during our quarterly DR exercises, but in order to do so we still have to pay for these licenses (albeit at a reduced price which also reduces the maintenance costs). These QMGRs are really only needed 4 days a year barring any significant data center outage.

The only product that we really evaluated closely was QPASA.

Make sure you take the time to set up an access model that will allow flexibility but also yield the granular control for access. This is even more important for when QMGRs are shared across applications.